Apparently, this year I am celebrating my 10th anniversary on sourceforge.net. You can see this on my sourceforge profile page.

Not to be proud of really. I did not created lots of open source code.

Web front end for vacation

The first project I started 5 years ago was the Web Frontend for Vacation Program. This is a very simple web administration interface for those using the “vacation” program to set out of office.

This project started several years ago and has been downloaded 500+ times. That would be 100 download a year or 10 per month since the release of the “final” code.

I always asked myself: “Does anyone care?” In 10 years, no one applauded, congratulated or send me a thank you. That probably would tell much more about the code quality than the friendliness of people. But yet.

Ymlp.Net

This other project I started earlier this year: YMLP.net (a .Net wrapper for the YMLP API). YMLP is an abbreviation for YourMailingListProvider. The name is self declaring, it’s a (cheap)mailing list provider, with an API. The sample code is only available in PHP and I ported it to .Net (C#).

The project has been downloaded 57 times since January this year. That would be about almost 10 per month. Not bad in my opinion. But even here, no one applauded, congratulated or send a small thank you. And I am pretty sure the code works. I use it regularly.

But for the few bugs we had in the code, not a single person reported something on the discussion board, issue tracker or send me an e-mail. No one send his improvements or patches to codeplex, to the forum or to me.

This project is meant for developers. It’s an API wrapper. End users don’t care and won’t use it directly. So you KNOW that there must have been made changes to the code. That is what developers do. Furthermore, I know pretty sure their are improvements, the API changed recently and I haven’t had time to implement all new methods last few weeks.

According to Ohloh this project would cost $ 47 157 to build it up from scratch. (Which is overrated due to the used calculation method). But still, their are lots of hours put into this project.

Someone has put time (and money) in the project. Someone created value. But do you think someone cares?

No one cares.

Since when did open source means: “profit from free code and don’t show any gratitude back to the community”.